More than 50 years later, Buffalo Bob Smith and Howdy Doody are still together.
“I’m sitting just 20 feet from him,” Smith said from his home in Flat Rock, N.C. “He’s in a nice Plexiglas case overlooking the 16th green of the Murehead Country Club golf course.”
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At 80, Buffalo Bob still has the big voice that summoned a generation of Americans into the Peanut Gallery every afternoon at 5:30 with a hearty, “Say, kids, what time is it?”
Howdy was born on Smith’s “Big Brother Bob” radio show. “I did this Mortimer Snerd-ish character called Elmer, who said this: `Ho, ho, ho, howdy doody!’ When kids came in to see the show they were disappointed. They said, `We want to see Howdy Doody.’ “
When Smith heard NBC was looking for a kids show, he pitched the idea of a marionette he’d call Howdy Doody. “We learned on Tuesday the 23rd (of December 1947) that we were going to be on the following Saturday. And we didn’t have a Howdy!” Smith said. “So, for the first three weeks, while the puppeteer was making Howdy, we pretended that he was in my desk drawer: `Oh, but I’m too bashful to come out!’ In the third week, he came out, no longer bashful.
“We started on what was called the full NBC network,” he recalled. “Six stations.”
“Howdy Doody” flourished, driving the sales of TV sets, while NBC’s New York and Hollywood centers extended electronic tentacles toward each other. When they met, NBC had about 180 affiliates and, in an episode celebrating its reach, “Howdy Doody” became the first TV show to use a split screen, with Howdy in Chicago and Buffalo Bob in New York. It was one of many firsts “Howdy Doody” piled up in its 13-year run.
“We were the first show on every day in quite a few markets,” Smith said. “There was no daytime television, just a test pattern until 5:30. We were the first show to reach 1,000 shows, then 2,000. And we were the first show on every day in color, in 1955.”
His sponsors became the comfort foods of the Baby Boom: Welch’s grape juice, Wonder Bread, Hostess Twinkies and Cup Cakes and Colgate toothpaste.
For Buffalo Bob, the realization of what he and “Howdy Doody” had achieved didn’t hit until a decade after they were off the air. A grad student at Penn called up and asked if Buffalo Bob could put on a “Howdy Doody” show.
“I thought he was putting me on,” Smith said. “This was 1970. Vietnam. Draft cards were burning. Dope was prevalent on campuses.”
He agreed to do the show, however, and screened a kinescope of the 10th anniversary telecast, followed by his show. “The auditorium sat 1,600 people and I think there were 2,000 there,” he said. “During the show and afterward, I saw tears coming down the girls’ cheeks.
“It was really then that I realized what an integral part of their lives that Howdy Doody was.”